The monastery in FE Three Houses is so dreadful... and it gets worse on new game+

[Blackquill]

Hey guys ! It's been almost a month since Three Houses was released and I would like to adress something that I really don't like about this otherwise really good entry in the franchise : the monastery. You see, I recently started my Black Eagle run after doing the Golden Deer route and the Blue Lion route. While I am curious to learn more about Edelgard and her team, I am also bummed out by how slow the game is because of the monastery, especially at the beginning. Time consuming is the monastery, it is really, really time consuming. Even if you want to speed things up (like I did with ng+ bonus) you still need to do lot of things (raise motivation levels, running some errands, mandatory quests, recruting other units, unlocking features...) in order to train your units properly. Besides the game runs not that well, there are many loading screens even when you fast travel. Also getting to one particular character in the monastery can be time wasting when it's very far from one fast travel point, it's not that much, but it adds up, it adds up and at the end of the day I finished the game in 55 hours and it was too long. Until the time skip, it's not something you can't just ignore, it's mandatory and it's not... fun. I actually like time management mechanics most of the time I like the Persona 3 to 5 and Majora's Mask is one of my favorite but in this game I just feel like I waste my time while I could do something better like fighting in maps, like Fire Emblem was supposed to do. That's what I like most about this franchise, it was the overall simplicity, you start a new map, you beat it, you get some story exposition and again and again. In Three Houses it's more like you get one battle, you get some stories and then............................................................ dull activities for one or two hours.... Again when I could avoid it I would but it's not always avoidable and it saddens me that such a great game is bloated by such elements.

Sorry to ramble again but let's also talk about the new game +, there are so many things wrong with this mode :
- Tutorial are still there, what ? I finished the game, I know the game, let me have fun.
- The monastery still locks many things behind quests.
- There are new and old cutscenes and the game don't tell you when it's the case or not, so maybe you will see a whole cutscene for nothing.
- The whole first part 1 is almost identical for every houses and you still need to start over.

It's like IS didn't thought that out, it's weird coming from them, they understood that well in Fire Emblem Fates and made you skip the introduction and made you directly choose your house. But in Three Houses you need to restart everything like you don't know a thing about the game, a shame, really.

 

[Dale Copper]

The Monastery desperately needs more events to keep it from getting stale or have seasonal changes to make it not look the exactly fucking same month to month.

 

[Cugel]

It lacks options and variety. Would need more activities. And the locked sauna is such a cocktease !

 

[Enforcer]

Exploring the monastery was fun for the first month and then just became tedious afterwards.

 

[Papercuts]

Time skip monastery is definitely lacking something to keep it engaging, but on NG+ I've gotten through them pretty fast. Mostly just spamming meals for support.

For their first shot at something like this, it's pretty good, but plenty of room for improvement.

 

[LegendofLex]

The Monastery desperately needs more events to keep it from getting stale or have seasonal changes to make it not look the exactly fucking same month to month.

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Yuuuuup this

I was actually kinda bothered by how we get a lot of waxing poetic about the changing of seasons and the goings on in any given month only for that to translate exactly 0% over to the game

 

[ArkhamFantasy]

Yeah, i want to see the branching story lines but im not spending dozens of hours in the monastery again.

 

[cecilpaladin32]

Exploring the monastery was fun for the first month and then just became tedious afterwards.

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This. I really enjoyed it for a few minutes thinking cool! FE with Persona elements! Only got to the start of Chapter 5 and I'm already finding the mechanic repetitive and boring. FWIW, I love social links in the Persona games, but it really bogs down the pacing of FE, imho.

 

[Dale Copper]

Yuuuuup this

I was actually kinda bothered by how we get a lot of waxing poetic about the changing of seasons and the goings on in any given month only for that to translate exactly 0% over to the game

Click to shrink...

Like just a visual change would make it feel less samey, snow falling, rain on certain days, waves of heat during summer.

Just something, the only thing the time skip gets is a lighting change and some places where construction is going on.

 

[Deleted member 249]

I like the Monastery, but I do think it stays far too static. It needs visual variation, and they need to add more events.

 

[Sub Boss]

wow , i skipped the game because of the ugly presentation but i thought the monastery was the best thing going out for it gameplay wise, sad to hear it slows things instead

 

[lovecatt]

Then skip it

 

[viskod]

When you get to the middle of Part II and the online stats for what to do each Free Day are heavy into Seminar and Rest that kind of tells you people are tired of fucking around with the Monastery.

 

[Sub Boss]

The Monastery desperately needs more events to keep it from getting stale or have seasonal changes to make it not look the exactly fucking same month to month.

Click to shrink...

Like just a visual change would make it feel less samey, snow falling, rain on certain days, waves of heat during summer.

Just something, the only thing the time skip gets is a lighting change and some places where construction is going on.

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This only gets me hyped for Rune Factory 5

 

[Deleted member 49438]

Time skip monastery is definitely lacking something to keep it engaging, but on NG+ I've gotten through them pretty fast. Mostly just spamming meals for support.

For their first shot at something like this, it's pretty good, but plenty of room for improvement.

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This is about how I feel. They needed to add a few more activities to give you more options post timeskip, but once you have your strategy down you can be done in 5 minutes. Lots of room to improve, but it does kind of make things drag, especially the first week of each month where you want to talk to everyone for their unique dialogue & a chance to up your support level.

 

[Dale Copper]

wow , i skipped the game because of the ugly presentation but i thought the monastery was the best thing going out for it gameplay wise, sad to hear it slows things instead

Click to shrink...

I'd say it's fine till the time skip, then it just feels like WAY more of the same.

It worse because by that point you should have a lot of points to do a lot of things because you been slowly building to it but it then become boring.

 

[Reyes]

Add Olympic Events where the Houses compete against each other in a variety of activities to see which is the best.

Add a scavenger hunt thats timed and have the locations of the items be hidden by riddles you need to solve

 

[Bit_Reactor]

The monastery being basically the only hub sucks and I hate the hub in general. It feels like needless padding. After playing Shadows of Valentia where the hubs maybe had 2-3 rooms wehre you could talk to everyone about everything there it's really hard to deal with even fast travelling everywhere and running around to get plants, fish if you need prof levels, use the training, etc.

I really hate the hub. It's cool at first, but by the time the skip happens I've been effing done with it since.

 

[wrowa]

The monastery lacks activities. It doesn't take long until you've got more activity points than you can reasonably spend on useful activities.

... But that actually only makes the monastery easier to skip. Waste your points on lunch with your students to improve your relationships and what more do you really need? You can go and try to recruit every character, but frankly, what's even the point? The game's easy anyway so that you really don't need to have two dozens of characters and recruiting a handful of characters is also simple enough without going particularly out of your way to convince them.

 

[weebro]

I haven't gotten to 3 Houses yet but perhaps a 3rd playthrough of a lengthy RPG in less than a month is contributing to those sentiments?

 

[HaremKing]

I can't believe that Part 1 White Clouds is pretty much the exact same in terms of maps/battles regardless what house you pick. That's over 50% of the playthrough being almost identical :( The split doesn't come till way later than Fates, which only had about ~20% of the main scenario shared between the three routes.

 

[WellbornWarrior]

I haven't gotten to 3 Houses yet but perhaps a 3rd playthrough of a lengthy RPG in less than a month is contributing to those sentiments?

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It's not like it's 3 distinct, complete stories, you are supposed to play all 3 paths to "complete" it once. And the excessive padding in form of the monastery, even on the first playthrough, is a legitimate problem.

 

[Moist_Owlet]

If your choices mattered it would suck less. Game is so goddam easy it doesnt really matter what you do.

 

[ShinobiBk]

I like the monastery but it needs a lot more things to do and ways to raise motivation.
The fight club is fun even if it's kind of bs. More activities like that would be cool

 

[weebro]

It's not like it's 3 distinct, complete stories, you are supposed to play all 3 paths to "complete" it once. And the excessive padding in form of the monastery, even on the first playthrough, is a legitimate problem.

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I definitely haven't played the game yet and it seems many other posters have complaints about the monastery area as well, didn't mean to make it sound like an OP issue.

 

[ShadowAUS]

I can't believe that Part 1 White Clouds is pretty much the exact same in terms of maps/battles regardless what house you pick. That's over 50% of the playthrough being almost identical :( The split doesn't come till way later than Fates, which only had about ~20% of the main scenario shared between the three routes.

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Even in part 2

Spoiler

the GD route and Church route are almost identical map wise with only a couple of differences

 

[aSqueakyLime]

I loved it at first and on the whole it's a really good idea, but yeah it needs more activities.

 

[Schopenhauer]

I think the real issue is that the game makes you play through the first half of the story again if you want to see another houses storyline.

Even if the monastery had more to do it is going to get stale after playing through mostly the same thing three times. I get why they did this but it was a bad choice on the developers part.

 

[Fridaynightcatlady]

It lacks options and variety. Would need more activities. And the locked sauna is such a cocktease !

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Yeah what's up with the sauna? Does it ever open its doors? Is it a tease for a dlc, maybe?

 

[Renteka-Bond]

I'm not surprised that I got tired of it by the time skip, so it didn't really hurt that bad, since the addition of the monastery/Persona elements was the biggest initial turnoff to the game in the first place. They did really drop the ball with it, because by the end, after making fun of Seminars being pointless for most of the game, just did those by the end cause I just wanted to be done with the game.

Luckily, after a buddy of mine went a different house, I could see that most of the game isn't actually different, so I don't feel compelled to immediately do a re-run.

 

[808s & Villainy]

Besides the game runs not that well, there are many loading screens even when you fast travel.

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Load screens that last like 2 seconds max

 

[Pizzamigo]

It's what's stopping me from continuing my play-through. I'm 30 hours in and it's just so tedious now. I love everything else about it, but the monastery is such a big part of the game that it's hard to ignore/skip. It's integrated heavily into the gaming loop and it halts the pacing down to a crawl.

If the next FE has something like the monastery again, I'm def not getting it. Which is a shame, but that's not what I'm looking for.

 

[Kino]

Yeah, I like the idea of the monastery, and I think they achieved what they were going for in the first part of the game, but I was sick of it by the second half of my first play through and ng+ has only made the flaws more apparent. I don't think adding features would have made the monastery any better, we needed more places to explore like a town or a camp.

 

[HylianSeven]

I like the idea of the monastery, but I do agree it could use more activities.

However, my first playthrough was Black Eagles C side. My second is Black Eagles E side. One thing that's a lot of fun is now that I know how all the mechanics and systems in the game work, I can much better optimize my characters. I didn't even really use or pay attention to the 3-starred skills (turn weakness into strength), which was something that made me able to get Dorothea to a Gremory this time (I never got her Faith high enough the first time). Since I know what I'm doing, I can much easier optimize characters. Typically I only need to explore the monastery once a month.

I do wish it would actually change seasonally, like have snow on the ground during the winter, etc. Unless I just haven't seen them on any of the routes I have been on, there are ZERO snow maps in the game! I'd like to see more activities though, and would potentially be down for a Persona 3 FES/P4G/P5R style expansion/re-release of the game, with balance issues addressed as well (probably involving a nerf for Lysithea unfortunately).

 

[Sumio Mondo]

This is definitely one area they will probably be doing a lot of QoL changes with the next game. That being said, can't you just skip to the end of the month to go straight to battles and just auto instruct (since game is easy enough anyway)? It reaches a point where you may as well just shovel the food down and move on from there, rest of the monastery stuff is pretty much padding that can be ignored.

 

[Magnemania]

I theorize that playing on NG+ actually makes the monastery worse. When the player has 10 activity points to use and 3 battles a week, they feel pressured to use them all.

The game's easy anyway so that you really don't need to have two dozens of characters and recruiting a handful of characters is also simple enough without going particularly out of your way to convince them.

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I wouldn't say that the game's difficulty is is responsible for making recruitment unattractive; the average deployable units for a single mission seems to be 10, which adds up to 13 units when including adjutants. The game starts the player off with 9 perfectly-good units and then throws at least 4 more free units at the player over the course of the game, so there is very little advantage to be gained from recruiting units (apart from one particular unit for the black knight). The main reason to recruit is for variety's sake and the support log.

 

[eddiemunstr]

On my first playthrough I definitely started to get tired of it when I did the 4th route from a earlier save I was so happy I could just skip all the supports and stuff I had seen before just to save some time. Its a nice idea but the monastery Is just too empty for how big it is and its a massive time sink that gets in the way before getting to more traditional fire emblem gameplay. I kinda dread any other playthroughs of the game because of it.

 

[Tibarn]

Agreed. It feels like a half-implemented thing, that's kind of understandable as the game has lots of good content and a big re-balance of FE mechanics, so the monastery is basically an extra, but even so it hurts the experience.

Even though, I'd prefer IS to retry the idea on their next game, I don't think that they should scrap it.

 

[monapon]

Yeah I'm not even at Part 2 and I'm already tempted to skip all the Explore sections. I'm not necessarily opposed to combing through already explored areas for additional quests and such but the Monastery layout frankly isn't particularly interesting, the music is just kind of OK, and the lack of a jump button means there's a lot of little invisible walls that make things frustrating.

I don't know if this would make things better but maybe they could have combined all the battle, seminar, and explore options into one and just increase the amount of activity points you get. That way you could have paralogues and quests triggering on the map which would break up the monotony a little and provide more opportunities for extra dialogue and character/world development.

 

[ItchyTasty]

It's fine pre-timeskip, after that it's useless and way to big for the lesser number of characters. It's also jarring storywise to keep traveling back to it while waging war.

Post-timeskip they should've used the classic world map, you could still use the month system and just argue that it's the traveling time to different cities. The explore option should be a more smaller compact area, like a war camp.

 

[BizzyBum]

I feel the monastery was fine before the time skip even though it felt a bit lifeless with people just standing still doing nothing.

At least then you had way more people to talk to and engage in support lines, recruit different classmates, level up your professor rating, focusing more on leveling up Byleth with faculty training, and dealing with limited exploration points so you had to more carefully plan your month.

Once you get to post time skip and exhaust support lines, A+ rating, S+ Byleth, and you have 10 exploration points but nothing to spend them on it definitly feels like a huge waste and a very missed opportunity for them to add new things to do.

Hopefully we'll see some improvements / additions in the DLC.

 

[kiaaa]

I think it could be improved, but like another poster said, you've put a ton of time into the game in a short period of time. Being a little burned out isn't surprising.

 

[Cronogear]

The monastery is such a damn drag. It definitely needed to evolve with time and seasons, and have more unique events take place.

 

[Jawmuncher]

I was tired of it before even getting half way. Totally skipping it as much as I can for NG+.
Easily my biggest complaint about the title, I swear I've spent more time running around that place than playing battles.

 

[lord_of_flood]

Yeah, it definitely starts to drag post time skip. I'm glad I spent a lot of time doing the monastery stuff in my first playthrough though. A large chunk of my time was spent grinding supports to recruit characters from other houses and doing stuff to increase my professor level. In NG+ I can just re-unlock supports and professor levels by spending Renown instead, so it'll be nice to spend a lot less time doing that stuff on subsequent playthroughs.

 

[woopWOOP]

Yuuuuup this

I was actually kinda bothered by how we get a lot of waxing poetic about the changing of seasons and the goings on in any given month only for that to translate exactly 0% over to the game

Click to shrink...

I was so looking forward to a cozy looking monastery covered in snow too :(

 

[LossAversion]

The Monastery desperately needs more events to keep it from getting stale or have seasonal changes to make it not look the exactly fucking same month to month.

Click to shrink...

This. One of the few disappointments I had with Three Houses was the fact that we never got rain or snow despite the monthly updates we got about the changing of the seasons.

 

[Pata Hikari]

Nah it's good.

Like with Fast Travel you don't have to run around if you don't want to and can just jump to where you want once you've talked to everybody for the month and then eat with them and drink tea.

 

[rsfour]

Lol I stopped playing after the first student battle or whatever. Where you fight the two other student leaders, and the two teachers. Haven't gone back since because I already found the monastery/persona elements annoying.

 

[Randdalf]

Anyone tried doing a skips only playthrough? i.e. always skipping to the end of the month at the start of each month, where possible.